Big Think

Question: What was the fundamental message of the book?

Dennett:    I think the most important thing I wanted them to take from the book is that, every big problem that we face in the 21st century has a religious dimension that is to say, whether it is energy or social justice or global warming or poverty or water.  If we try to solve these problems without dealing with the religions and the religious aspirations and fears and hopes of the people involve.  We will probably come up with the wrong solutions to those problems and so we need to understand religion in the same way we need to understand the climate and energy and water if because good intentions aren’t enough we have to deal intelligently and with knowledge about this phenomena and so we should, we should study religion much more intensively so that we don’t blow it.